Model For Agent Service Scale Optimization Of Online Service Center Considering Customer Abandonment

With the rapid development of mobile Internet and instant messaging technology,the new online customer service center has gradually replaced the traditional call center and become the mainstream of call center in recent years.The biggest difference with traditional call center is that one customer can serve more than one customer at the same time.The maximum number of customers an agent can serve at the same time,named as service scale,directly affects the efficiency of the online customer service center.When the number increases,the agent needs to be frequently switched between several customers,which will reduce the quality and efficiency of the agent and cause customers to give up while waiting for the reply of the customer service.;while the number decreases,more customers are forced to wait for the service,which will lead to a higher rate of customer abandonment and a lower rate of agent utilization.Therefore,when setting the upper limit of the number of customers that can be served at the same time,the online customer service center should not only consider its impact on the average waiting time of customers in the system,but also consider its impact on the abandonment rate of customers.How to set the upper limit of the number of people that online customer service can serve at the same time is a new problem in online customer service center compared with traditional call center.In order to analyze how to set the upper limit of the number of people that can be served by the online customer service center at the same time,this paper does the following work:(1)Establish a double-layer queuing model to calculate basic queuing indexes such as average stay time and abandonment rate of customers in the queuing system.The basic queuing theory model is only applicable to the "one-to-one" model where one customer serves only one customer at the same time in the call center,but it is not directly applicable to the situation where one customer can chat with several customers at the same time in the online service center.This paper analyzes the characteristics of online customer service mode,divides the one-to-many service process into two one-to-one service processes,and establishes a two-layer queuing model of message layer and customer layer by using queuing theory.According to this model,the average stay time and abandonment rate of customers in the system can be calculated directly by giving the customer arrival rate,customer patience time,the number of customer consultation messages and the average time taken by customers and customer service to reply each message.(2)Using the logic of the two-layer queuing model,this paper establishes a queuing model considering the abandonment behavior of customers in the process of waiting for customer service access system.According to this model,the average stay time of customers and the abandonment rate of customers in the process of waiting for customer service access can be calculated.At the same time,flexsim simulation was used to verify the correctness of the double-layer queuing model,and further completed the sensitivity analysis when the average customer arrival rate,average customer patience time,customer switching cost,the average time of customer reply message and other relevant parameters change.(3)Based on the second part,this paper also considers the situation that the customer abandonment behavior in the process of interacting with the customer service because the customer waits too long for the reply message,and established a queuing model that only considers the abandonment behavior of the customer in the process of interacting with the customer service as well as a queuing model that also considers the abandonment behavior of the customer in the process of waiting for the customer service to access the system and the abandonment behavior of the customer in the process of interacting with the customer service,and corresponding flexsim simulation models are established respectively for verification.On this basis,the influence of the change of customer’s patience value on the optimal number of online customer service is further discussed through the numerical experiment.The research in this paper has a strong practical guiding significance.Enterprises can choose a suitable model according to their own conditions.Enterprises can calculate the average stay time and abandon rate of customers in the system by giving basic parameters such as the arrival rate of customers,the number of customer consultation messages,the value of customer patience,the average time for customers and customer service to reply to each message.And take this as the basis for setting the optimal number of online customer service.When the external parameters change within a certain range,the enterprise does not need to spend extra costs.It only needs to adjust the upper limit of the number of online customer service at the same time,so as to optimize the average stay time and abandon rate of customers in the system,which is of great significance for the cost-oriented enterprise operation.The research of this paper also has a strong theoretical significance.It not only provides a referential idea for the establishment of the one-to-many queuing model of online customer service considering the abandonment of customers,but also provides a basic model for the calculation of human demand and the research of load distribution in the process of the expansion of single-agent online customer service center to multi-agent online customer service center.